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Digital Marketing

What checks do when you assess online advertising opportunities for your business?

How do you know you’re not about to waste your money when you partner with a new digital advertising platform?

Recently I have been working with small business in the Morzine area to help with their digital presence. In the process I have come across both advertising opportunities and intermediaries for offering opportunities for these businesses to promote their services. Some of these may well be great, but not all are 100% correct for the needs of the businesses I have been working with. Yet when the sales pitch is coming at you it can be tough to sort the wheat from the chaff at times.

To help clear this up, and provide some structure for small businesses to use I thought I would share my approach. This is a fairly lengthy read, but I hope it will be useful to you.

At the end you’ll find the gift of a super helpful comparison chart download as a thanks for reading!

Thanks to an offer posted on their Facebook page to pay the fines for UK families who took their children out of school for a holiday, they suddenly found themselves being spoken about by some big media outlets including Radio 5, ITV, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, the BBC, the front page of The Times and many more. For a small unknown business operating a single chalet in Morzine it is the stuff of dreams.

Whatever the feelings about the content, It was great to see a little chalet company from my home town of Morzine leading a charge in the press.

Today I am not commenting from a PR point of view as I am not a PR professional. However from a digital strategy perspective sadly they missed a couple of tricks with this push which I wanted to explore today. Hopefully next time around they can go one step further and deliver digital awesomeness as well as exposure.

2014 has brought with it a new advent of productivity for me.

Having set up this blog back in 2012 I have suffered 2 false starts and a long period out in the wilderness, avoiding typing in the URL as much as possible. I didn’t want to see the site, I wanted to forget it was there completely. From time to time I’d come back and have a quick spurt of enthusiasm, I might change the categories or reword the about page. Every 6 months I’d change the theme entirely, searching for a new one which I was convinced would lead to more creativity and enthusiasm on my part to write.*

*(sound familiar to anyone? Or is that just me?)

But in total honesty this was procrastination and avoidance of the real issue:

blogging is bloody hard!

Although Dilbert published the above strip in 2009 my experience shows this problem remains today, when large corporates look to embrace digital innovation. There is a real disconnect between the speed of advancement in the digital industry and the ability for large corporates to react to it which leads to inefficiencies and lost opportunities across the board.

But, as with a fun run, there are others around you also running, also heading in the same direction and helping to inspire you and pull you along when you drop back (and vice versa of course). But at it’s very core it’s still a race, things move forward quickly and if you aren’t running at all, then you quickly get left behind (perhaps as you the reader may have just been with this analogy?).

It is this issue I want to explore a little with this post, as it’s something I am experiencing in a new role these days in a large corporation.